Postcolonial global constitutionalism

The chapter questions the progress narrative driving global constitutionalism from a postcolonial perspective. It investigates the connection between constitutionalism and colonialism by reference to domestic constitutionalism and the Southern turn in comparative constitutional law and identifies global aspects of constitutionalism in relation to the Global South. Global constitutionalism is reconsidered as an architecture of domination that emphasises its principled, power restricting impetus while concealing its dominant and often violent external dimension. The chapter argues that the global constitutionalism project invests considerable time and effort in building a corpus of distinctly ‘public’ constitutional principles while ignoring the ‘private’, the economy, and their relationship to the Global South. The chapter therefore proposes a political economy of global constitutionalism that addresses the interplay of colonial law, transnational private law, domestic law, and international law in enabling and constraining global capitalism across time.